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Here's a prediction about Harriet Harman's proposal to ban age discrimination in the workplace. When it becomes law, firms will get around it by making employees in their early fifties redundant - just before they can enforce their new rights.
The law of unintended consequences always triumphs, as Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, noticed this week. She warned that existing maternity rights for women workers have boomeranged already. Far from helping, they were making it harder for them to find a job.
The traditional explanation is that sexist pigs in the boardroom discriminated against women. While I agree that there are sexist employers, there's hardly an economist left who believes misogyny offers a full or even halfway decent explanation for apparently discriminatory treatment.
My favourite research comes from the London School of Economics. Its academics looked at how outandproud lesbians fared. Far from being met with sexism and homophobia, they were more likely to be in work than heterosexual women and earned on average 11 per cent more.
The key difference was that employers didn't expect lesbians to claim expensive maternity rights and vanish from the office for months on end.
Ms Brewer's way to even the scales is to grant fathers more paternity leave so that mothers can go back to work while the dads take over childcare. I don't think it's going to help, and not only because she wants to impose new burdens on business at the beginning of a recession.
In theory her idea sounds fine: an employer would have to treat potential employees equally as both men and women could claim rights to parental leave. In practice, employers would know that men, in general, want to provide for their children while women, in general, want to look after them. I'm not saying there aren't men who make fine househusbands or women who want to call a cab to take them from the maternity ward straight back to work or couples who manage to split childcare duties with scrupulous fairness. But they are exceptions - and everyone knows it.
The social revolution which began in the Seventies has brought many advantages but its glaring mistake was to concentrate on the struggle for equality in the workplace without realising that employers would, if they could, commit their women workers to a lifetime of chastity.
The best way to move on is to make work matter less by campaigning for increased child benefits and tax breaks for families. Government should recognise that while rational employers have little interest in children, a rational society has every interest in ensuring that the next generation is well cared for.
Reader views (1)
What about the people who don't want children. What tax breaks are we going to get.
I am fed up to the eye ball listening to people telling me how they are going to look after me in my old age.
If we keep breeding as fast as we are there will be nothing left for my old age or anyone elses.
If you can't afford them then don't have them!
All the emigrates 2.5 million of them, I am sure will be enough to look after me and all the other non-breeders.
- James, Brighton UK, 17/07/2008 06:04
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